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Oracle’s new autonomous database

July 17th, 2018

With the latest Oracle Database release (version 18c), there’s a cloud-only product available called Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud that allows for a more autonomous data warehouse. It’s not artificial intelligence really, but more of a self-monitoring and self-adjusting system.

Some of the hands-on tasks that a database administrator previously had to work on have now been automated. For example, if part of a database was slowing things down due to a bad disk, the database administrator would need to go in, move the data to another area, and restore the bad disk. Now that’s been automated along with many other tasks in this new system.

As this technology continues to evolve, it will certainly make things easier for database administrators and other IT administrators. There used to be a point in time where you had to intervene to let a database grow. Then they evolved to where they could grow more on their own. But you still had to have someone monitoring it to see when it got close to max storage, because it could only grow as long as you had adequate storage.

With this version being cloud-based, it will be interesting to see if it’s the beginning of cloud-only services for some databases. But regardless, it’s an interesting step to watch as they release a database that’s billed as being self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing.

But what does that do to the database administrator’s job? No, it’s not going to eliminate the need for a database administrator. Instead, it’s going to allow them to do more with less time. They can focus on planning and strategy rather than spending their time keeping the database up and running. Yes, most database administrators are still going to monitor it and check what it’s doing, but it really will free up a lot of their time to focus on other priorities, and that’s a good thing.